Hepatitis B, C, and Delta —Updates in Screening and Infection Prevention Opportunities for Eradication

Opinion statementHepatitis B virus (HBV) is one of the most frequent pathogen worldwide and actively infects around 300 million people in the world. There is an effective recombinant vaccine available from almost 40  years. It is able to elicit protective antibodies levels in more than 95% of the vaccinated population. Nevertheless, HBV causes a chronic disease that in most cases may not be diagnosed for many years due to the absence of clear symptoms during the acute phase as well in the chronic phase before the establishment of severe clinical pictures as liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. To envisage the eradication of HBV, it will be necessary to warrant that (1) the vaccine against this virus was utilized in the whole population, preferentially adding it in national vaccine schedule as va ccination that should be started just after birth and to warrant (2) every infected patient access to effective treatment using pegylated α-interferon or nucleos(t)ide analogs. Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infects 100 to 200 million people around the world according to different statistics. There is not any effective vaccine to avoid this infection, but there are several new drugs called Direct Acting Anti-viral Agents (DAAs) that reach sustained response rate near 100% even with the presence of liver cirrhosis or HIV co-infection. This approach changed hepatitis C epidemiological picture from a w idespread disease with large difficulties in succeeding in the treatment to a cura...
Source: Current Treatment Options in Infectious Diseases - Category: Infectious Diseases Source Type: research